Our power was off for 56 hours. We had a battery back up for our boiler pump, and keeping the house at about 60 carried us for more than 48 hours. The camping gear allowed us to cook and heat water. The real downside was that we had guests coming into town on Saturday, and the only bathroom in the house was all prepped for painting the night before the power went out. You just can't paint without good lighting, and I really could have used one of those old-fashioned hoovers that clean a carpet without electricity... :) Other than that, we had fun. In the 28 years that we have lived here, this is the first outage that lasted more than 8 hours. Jo Grahn At 04:52 PM 12/30/2003 -0700, you wrote:
I have a 8000 watt natural gas backup generator with a transfer switch so it comes on automatically 30 seconds after the power goes off. It is also relatively quiet, 70 decibels. It has come in handy many times but I only needed it for a few hours during the current power problems.
Clear Skies Don Colton
I hear ya C.H.. I installed a free standing wood stove in my old Condo. It was great, I would build two fires a day and put a small lump of coal on top. You had to open windows it was so hot in there. Today the coal idea may not be too good considering the inversions etc but it sure worked good back then.
Generators, hummmm. We should have asked Santa for a 500 gal fixed propane tank and a 10KW self start generator in a sound proof shed with auto-sensing cut-over panel. Well, I guess we may have to settle for a 5KW and an extension cord to just run the heater and one wall circuit eh?
Or just wall paper the house with those little hand warmers, then when the power goes out you can just bang on a bunch of them with a hammer to mix the chemicals and warm the house. That would work for 4 or 5 storms... B)
Tnx es 73 de n7zi Gary
"Why buy something for ten bucks when you can make it for a hundred.", J.R.
Hi Gary:
I've already worked a generator and wood stove into our '04 budget...never again!
C.
BTW, the new carbon-fiber tube Celestrons cannot be used for deep-frying turkeys. Only use the older models with aluminum tubes. ;)
--- Gary Liptrot <n7zi@comcast.net> wrote:
Saturday was our day for power fizzle. It went off at 04:30 and came back on at 21:30 that night. Yes the temp was getting low. I was shopping for a better heat source than my fireplace and found a thingy called DynaGlow at Walley World for about 80 bucks.